External controller-based storage grows 8%

Bloomberg writes.

The first quarter of 2012 was the 10th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, and its results met Gartner's expectations of an 8% year-over-year increase.

"Revenue by host interface protocol and regional geography varied from Gartner's 4Q11 forecast update," said Roger Cox, research VP at Gartner. "Block-access host interface notably associated with SAN infrastructures came in at 4% year-over-year growth in vendor revenue against a forecast of 5.2%, while file-access beat the Gartner forecast with 22.9% year-over-year growth, four percentage points higher than Gartner's forecast."

Both NetApp and Dell gained share in the first quarter of 2012, PR Wire reports.

Dell's ECB disk storage acquisition strategy is beginning to pay off, with 73.5%of its ECB disk storage revenue being produced by its EqualLogic PS series and by the Dell Compellent Storage Centre platform. Relying on the proven value propositions of its core Data ONTAP technology, NetApp was one of three vendors to achieve share gains in the first quarter of 2012.

Hitachi/HDS increased its VSP platform revenue by 24.5% in the first quarter of 2012 compared with the same period a year earlier, increasing its high-end enterprise (aka monolithic frame-based) market share by 6.3 percentage points. With a 42.9%year-over-year increase in revenue, Oracle's ZFS storage appliance was just one of two vendors to gain share in the network attached storage (NAS) market in the first quarter.

Although it lost 0.7 percentage points of market share, IBM increased its percentage of internally developed ECB disk storage platforms to 70.4%of its total first-quarter 2012 revenue, up nine percentage points over the first quarter of 2011. HP's 3PAR, which grew 137.4%year-over-year, was HP's lone first-quarter 2012 highlight as EVA, P4000 LeftHand and the P2000 MSA series continued to decline.

With 17.1% and 14.1% respective year-over-year vendor revenue growth, the Latin America and North America regions did exceptionally well compared with Gartner forecast expectations, while the Asia-Pacific region, at only 4.1% year-over-year growth, and Japan, with a 12.3% decline, fell far short, MENAFN.COM notes.